brimble

I'm reminded of Scott Alexanders musing re: whether someone "has ADD" if they have trouble focusing on things that are simply boring as fuck, like looking at spreadsheets (or code...) all day every day, week, after week, after week.

But then if all their peers are in fact outperforming them, because they're already all self-medicating for ADD symptoms, or have a prescription for ADD meds, so they can focus on something that most ordinary people would have trouble focusing on... what then?

What's normal in a work environment that's fundamentally and extremely not normal?

Until very recently (a year or two ago?), the US didn't allow film studios to own movie theaters. Hadn't for something like 70 years. That was due to antitrust action over a situation pretty similar to what's happening with streaming services.

I looked at it the other day after the discussion thread about JS frameworks, but bounced when I saw ".svelte" files.

I accept (demand, really) TypeScript but I've become allergic to any attempt to add much more on top of JS than that. I can just see the next poor bastard coming along in a short year or two and going "oh god, WTF is a '.svelte' file? What did my piece of shit predecessor fall for?"

I'm looking into Vue today. Possibly I'll settle on something even simpler.

React's certainly out, and thank god the mood is finally shifting enough that I can abandon it without harming my career (much). Slow, janky, and god they've made some weird choices with it in the last few years. It was always a bit heavy, but it felt like it had some degree of elegance to it before that—if only in parts of the API itself, not the implementation.

[EDIT] Oh good lord, '.vue'. Don't any of these just use normal-ass code? Sigh.

Yeah, it's normal. When you do the same damn thing for the tenth time (or more) and you've watched all the previous ones be discarded one way or another, usually without ever doing anywhere near enough good to justify making them in the first place, you start to get the sense that you're basically just one of the pegs up near the top of the Plinko board that is modern business—not even one of the players, or the puck, but a peg—and it fucking sucks. I think some dude named Marx wrote about this a bunch.

Anywho, I've solved this by having fewer opinions about technology and generally giving fewer shits. Doomed project? Yeah, they almost all are, so, fine. Bad tech? Most of it's terrible, that's normal. Some moron having way too big a say in the project and making it worse while creating unnecessary work? Yeah, that's normal.

We must imagine Sisyphus happy. I suppose.

I've kinda thought about starting an agency or trying to launch a product, but between not being able to stand looking at a computer screen after my day job, and my guess that that'd end up sucking just as much, but in different ways, I've not done it yet. Honestly, probably never will. Coming to terms with what I, realistically, won't ever do has helped some, too. Kill any dreams you don't care enough about to work toward today. Just let 'em go.

A shift in the competitive landscape might encourage distributors to integrate better with aggregators or meta-interfaces of various sorts. Or directly with one another, in some fashion.

Would all of the Star Wars content on Disney+ even have been made if Disney couldn't put it on Disney+, for example?

I think the strongest argument in favor of the current arrangement is that monopolies yield rents, which (might!) mean more money for production. However, I think in a world where no production companies could own streaming platforms, production companies would probably... you know, still produce lots of content, since selling content would be their main way of making money, and you can't sell what you don't have.

More importantly than whether Disney would still be OK, I think it would make it easier for indies and startups to participate in the market.

I think it's a good idea to mitigate the downsides of the monopoly granted by copyright, when possible. We saw similar problems with studio ownership of movie theaters, and solved that by not letting studios own movie theaters (via an antitrust suit). That's only very recently, and in what may be the twilight of the movie theater itself, changed.

In the current environment, I suspect we'll see (are already seeing, to some extent) history repeat itself, but not do anything about it this time, because we're so skittish of regulating markets now.

I don't think you should have to own an extensive catalog of content to launch a streaming service. Nor that you should effectively have to grovel for the patronage of one of a handful of integrated production+distribution mega corporations to undertake production of new media. But that's rapidly where the market's heading, and I don't see any mechanism to change that course short of anti-trust action.

There are, as usual, some benefits to the rents the current monopolistic system produces (extra cash sloshing around to throw at projects, for example—extra R&D money is a typical benefit monopolies produce, and in this case, because the monopolies are on particular content rather than on all content [so far—Disney's getting alarmingly close], there remain incentives to actually spend that money on, if you will, R&D, or the closest thing to it in media production) but at the cost reduced competition on cost & quality, and of making it much harder to enter the market, for new players.

It matters if they're not spending less for each show, on average, than other services. If you're dropping $20m a season, on average, and so are your competitors, but more of yours are duds, that's bad. If you're dropping $5m to your competitors' $20m, maybe it's not a problem if, say, twice as many of your seasons are bad.

But, part of the trouble with this analysis, as far as sussing out the above issue, is season-count. How many Netflix originals are as long as, say, The Sopranos? Or The Wire? How many are only one season, or maybe two? It's possible (possible! I do not know) the hours-of-original-content difference between Netflix and the other services isn't as large as this suggests. Or that it's even larger. Hard to tell.

I'd say that this chart points toward bad things for Netflix, but without some other pieces of data it's hard to tell what it's actually saying.

Exactly that. I want to see more competition on price, features, and quality, and less on content availability.

It'd also make it easier to enter both parts of that market, as a production company or a distributor, which is currently something that only a company with an enormous pile of cash and/or ownership of an existing large catalog of material, can realistically do.

The ratio of OK-or-worse to good-or-exceptional sure appears to be a less favorable for Netflix than the others.

Though people's rankings seem crazy to me. Apparently just producing a Star Wars thing and not totally shitting the bed in the process counts as "exceptional". Then again... yeah, that's kinda true, I guess. From a certain point of view. Still, better than nearly all shows on all those services? Yikes. I dunno about that.

I think people are watching a lot more video in general. There are multiple generations, at this point, that mostly wouldn't pay for cable or even bother with rabbit ears even if TV & movie streaming services didn't exist, but do pay for a streaming service or three. I don't think YouTube's going to beat that entire market, unless they shift tactics pretty substantially. I think they expanded the market, though, grabbing almost all of that new territory for themselves in the process (at least until TikTok came along)

What should happen, if we're doing "shoulds", is that it shouldn't be permitted for one company to own both distribution and production, nor for such companies to create long-term exclusivity agreements with one another.

The downvotes are because it's so incredibly stupid that one must hope it is a trolling attempt, or intended as a deadpan joke of some kind.

Wouldn't be that weird if they were. Perfect fit every time and any customizations he wants, for a relative cost that'd be indistinguishable from "free", considering how much money he has. Why not? If I could pay nickels per item and get bespoke-everything, I absolutely would.

This was the case in the Midwest in our basically-the-same-shape-as-modern-cars 90s family cars. We'd use the windshield cleaner thing next to the gas pump nearly every time we stopped, when on road trips, and for good reason—there'd be a few large splatters and a bunch of smaller ones, every time. And that's if it wasn't particularly buggy out that day—there were some times we stopped for the windshield, not for gas.

I think I've done that like... four or five times, total, since the year 2000. And I think every time it was for a single big bug-splatter.

[EDIT] I also recall there being tens of times more large insects—butterflies, large moths, grasshoppers, katydids—around in general back in the late 80s and early 90s, even in the 'burbs, like they were just all over the place in the Spring and Summer, you'd walk through lawn-length grass at the school playground and tons of them would be all around you, hopping away or taking to the air, and now I have to try pretty hard to find even one... but surely that can't be right, can it? That'd be super noticeable by scientists who track that kind of thing. Right?

It's some thing about "getting people to think about the future" but all it does is make it harder to read. I've never seen it anywhere but HN.

Conway, too, found much to interest him, apart from the engrossing problem he had set himself. During the warm, sunlit days he made full use of the library and music room, and was confirmed in his impression that the lamas were of quite exceptional culture. Their taste in books was catholic, at any rate; Plato in Greek touched Omar in English; Nietzsche partnered Newton; Thomas More was there, and also Hannah More, Thomas Moore, George Moore, and even Old Moore. Altogether Conway estimated the number of volumes at between twenty and thirty thousand; and it was tempting to speculate upon the method of selection and acquisition. He sought also to discover how recently there had been additions, but he did not come across anything later than a cheap reprint of Im Western Nichts Neues. During a subsequent visit, however, Chang told him that there were other books published up to about the middle of 1930 which would doubtless be added to the shelves eventually; they had already arrived at the lamasery. "We keep ourselves fairly up-to-date, you see," he commented.

"There are people who would hardly agree with you," replied Conway with a smile. "Quite a lot of things have happened in the world since last year, you know."

"Nothing of importance, my dear sir, that could not have been foreseen in 1920, or that will not be better understood in 1940."

"You're not interested, then, in the latest developments of the world crisis?"

"I shall be very deeply interested—in due course."

— James Hilton, Lost Horizon

Am I wrong? Am I just creating an environment of anxiety?

No. Parenting and schools have gone completely to hell. You're not wrong, everyone else is. I still can't believe schools started letting kids carry their cell phones with them to class all day. As early as elementary school. WTF.

For my part, I figure my kids can have an unrestricted cell phone (and so, unrestricted Internet) as soon as they can pay for the device and plan on their own. If they can hold down a job to cover the bill, they can probably handle it. Fuck giving 8-year-olds personal smartphones. Or even 12-year-olds. That's insane.

Does that imply you can’t use Redux without React at all?

Yikes, I hope not. One of my favorite things about Redux (last time I used it, maybe three years ago) was that it was easy, and even natural, to build an API client library around it that could be used almost anywhere that JS will run, because it wasn't tied to React.

Yeah, last I checked they paid under typical wages (already bad, by coastal standards) at local jobs in my area. Jobs that have much easier interviews. And many of them allow remote, too.

I didn't end up with a local employer (again—I have in the past), but I do have a remote job that pays more than local work. And it was easier to get than a GitLab job. So why even apply, unless they've significantly increased pay relative to other options?

This misses the part of the game where the doctor's office has you fill out forms giving them a bunch of the same info they already have. Twice. In the same visit. This may take 20 or more minutes. For no good reason whatsoever.

Then the ongoing ARG portion where you have to repeatedly sit on hold for hours with the provider's billing department, insurance, and the state insurance commission and/or your congressperson's office, to finally get all the billing sorted out without getting screwed, all while receiving all kinds of scary letters that the people on the phone will tell you to ignore.

[EDIT] Oh and I bet the Canadian version of the game doesn't even have some of the greatest antagonists of the American edition: the people whose entire job is to wander around emergency rooms bugging very sick people about payment and insurance.

Redux is the only thing (sort of) from the React ecosystem that I'd save from a fire. But mine seems to be a minority opinion.

AJAX was originally about speed, but as soon as it changed from fetching and injecting HTML fragments, to fetching data (usually JSON) and performing a bunch of transformations and interpretations of it before finally modifying the DOM, it's been in practice slow as hell compared with traditional server-side rendering.

Like with those "personality tests" where anyone with decent perception and reading comprehension can easily tell which outcomes each answer's going to push them toward, and so obtain any result they like.

Is the correct response to slip a Benjamin to another waiter to "accidentally" trip the one who screwed up, so you can judge from their response what your demeanor should be like when requesting a correction?

Using container features to limit access of a program to the broader machine (disk, network, other processes) seems like it would tend to be more secure than... not doing that. Right? It's not as if I'm exposing any docker remote-control-related stuff to the network.

I'm no expert, but I can imagine that automatically opening an air vent to the outdoors, when a fire is detected, isn't a great idea.

I use weed for both these cases—shutting my mind up so I can sleep and/or dulling physical pain in case of illness so I can sleep, if it doesn't rise to the level of needing/being-able-to-get serious painkillers, plus (at lower doses, and far less often) for reducing anxiety during waking hours.

Works great, wish I'd started years ago. Leaves me much better-rested in the morning than other prescription sleep aids I've tried. On nights when I know I'll have a nice 9ish hours uninterrupted, I pair it with a little melatonin to keep me from waking up completely if I stir a little after the weed's worn off, and it's the best damn sleep of my life.

A+++++ would recommend. Screw you for lying to me, William S. Sessions.

I'd just assumed they've decided to make the experience of using and/or buying the Java edition suck on purpose to drive people toward their subscription-based hosting solutions with the Bedrock version, but if that also sucks more than it should, maybe whoever's in charge of it just doesn't know WTF they're doing in general. Seems weird that they'd so badly screw up something that was a cash cow and practically on auto-pilot when they got it.

I should probably just stand up a Minetest server alongside Minecraft and try it out. I've been on Minecraft since the really early days, so I hate to move away from it, but it's becoming such a damn chore, entirely due to how they've handled the account transition and how purchasing works.

Buying the game now requires navigating a couple sites, back and forth, in the correct order, and getting past MS attempts to block seemingly any new account for non-existent "suspicious activity". If you're buying for a kid and make the mistake of not lying about their age, you'll also experience the hell of MS' family account management interface, including having to track down an obscure and not-obviously-related setting to let the new copy connect to any multiplayer server, including local ones. There are, of course, multiple game-related settings screens, because why would it make sense? And only one of them has what you need. Plus you need to visit it in the correct fashion to have it apply to the child account, or else it won't work.

And you'll need to juggle logins to both accounts—the parent account, and the child account—and bounce between them a couple times to get it all working. There's no way normal users are managing to do it successfully.

As for the account transitions, it took me a couple tries to get mine working, and my wife's tried several times and they keep telling her on her MS account(s) that she doesn't own Minecraft and needs to buy it. I haven't looked into it, but I imagine she's missing some non-obvious step. Her experience is likely pretty common.

[EDIT] Oh, another thing I haven't looked into yet: as of a few days ago its started telling my kid they don't own it, and we need to buy it. They fucking definitely do own a copy. No idea what's up with that, and I'm dreading having to figure it out.